Bringing the Folk Community into the Future. On the Socialist Content of Communist Folkloristics

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F67985955%3A_____%2F24%3A00588076" target="_blank" >RIV/67985955:_____/24:00588076 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

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DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Bringing the Folk Community into the Future. On the Socialist Content of Communist Folkloristics

Original language description

The historical existence of socialist folkloristics surprises no one. Yet communist folkloristics remains an enigma. If lower-cased “socialism” is typically understood generically as a political practice, then there is no difficulty comprehending specific ways that ruling regimes in the Soviet Western Borderlands, following official Soviet policy, made use of folkloric material and supported its academic study for a variety of propagandistic purposes on behalf of the Soviet form of Communism (with a capital C). If the generic form of lower-cased “communism,” on the other hand, is an ideology, that is to say, a set of broadly interlacing ideas, then its relationship to folklore appears more complicated. Indeed, few researchers operating outside the framework of Communist Party hegemony have devoted much attention to the role of philosophically communist ideas in the folkloristics of Communist-led Europe. More often, researchers have emphasized the nationalist and romantic-agrarian ideologies that accompanied folkloristics in the region long before the field became the object of official Communist policy. As a result, the phenomenon of communist folkloristics tends to be discussed as if it were a historical peculiarity, a meeting of two incongruous worldviews, which only political expedience or happenstance could have brought together. Yet popular, amateur artistic activity, with folklore as its paradigmatic form, was a central aspect of cultural policy during most of the period of Communist Party ascendancy in the region, and probably no other coordinated public intervention in support of folklore has ever been undertaken on so grand a scale. Could it really be that the long cohabitation of Communism and folklore was only a marriage of convenience?

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

C - Chapter in a specialist book

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60404 - Folklore studies

Project

<a href="/en/project/LTC18040" target="_blank" >LTC18040: Media of the cultural opposition in Czechoslovakia</a><br>

Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2024

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name

Folklore and Ethnology in the Soviet Western Borderlands: Socialist in Form, National in Content

ISBN

978-1-6669-0653-0

Number of pages of the result

23

Pages from-to

59-81

Number of pages of the book

294

Publisher name

Lexington Books

Place of publication

Lanham

UT code for WoS chapter

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